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What is space-and-time?

posted on Wednesday, May 17, 2017

Is Arkani-Hamed right? Is space-time “doomed”?

Nima Arkani-Hamed[1] of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton says, “Almost all of us believe that space-time doesn’t really exist, space-time is doomed and has to be replaced by some more primitive building blocks.” 2 That quote is from 06 minutes, 11 seconds of a lecture Arkani-Hamed gave in 2014 at the Perimeter Institute in Ontario. Max Tegmark of MIT and Stephen Hawking of Cambridge want to throw out infinity, yet none of them are ready to throw out the big bang theory. Bruce Camber says, “I think that’s where we all need to begin. The theory defies three most basic principles in science and mathematics: (1) a simple start, (2) a simple logic, and (3) a simple logical start for complex topics like infinity, indeterminacy, fluctuations, incompleteness, and imperfections.

Camber has been communicating with leading scholars for as long as he can remember. In December 2011 he began coordinating the Big Board-little universe project; and by 2014, Camber began to question the voracity of the big bang theory. [2] He had multiplied the Planck units by 2, over and over and over again and in that process he discovered that there are 202 base-2 steps to go from the first moment of creation to the Age of the Universe. By focusing on the fractional seconds of the early life of the universe, Notations 1 to 143, he began to identify the evolution of each of the big bang epochs, all without a bang. “Not even a little bang,” he commented, “there is a natural inflation and it provides a more ordered, quiet expansion of the universe.”

Multiplying and dividing by 2 is called base-2 exponentiation. In his model space and time become finite, quantized and derivative. He continued, “We all taught space and time were infinite. It was just commonsense (thanks to Sir Isaac Newton). Instead of throwing out infinity, we should try to redefine it. Perhaps we could try something like this: Infinity is continuity and symmetry. Continuity captures our numbers – that creates an initial ordering, and symmetry captures our geometries – that creates our initial relations.”

That is a paradigm shift for the universe. These numbers create a very different and a new picture of the universe. There’s no bang, but the big bang epochs actually remain as defined. Camber said, “One might say base-2 from the Planck units is a scripting language that simulates the big bang without-the-bang and defines the epochs better than they’ve already been defined.”

Camber asked rhetorically, “How can we explore the universe if some of our most basic assumptions are off?”

Max Tegmark of MIT appears to be leading the attack on infinity. He just wants to stop using the concept altogether. Camber says, “No, no, no, let’s redefine it. I think continuity (numbers) and symmetry (geometries) could easily replace time and space. We shouldn’t abandon infinity. It is a key part of mathematics and physics and science in general. Every non-repeating, never-ending number — I’m told there there may be as many as 300 such constants — are the access paths between the finite and infinite. We just need to find out how to plug them into all 202 notations.”